Dark comedy all too real in Quebec

On the heels of a decade of federal, provincial and municipal scandals, Quebecers are more likely to see their politicians as con artists than as honest brokers — a sea change for an electorate that long equated a political calling with the cream of the province’s crop.

That corrosively negative perception dominated the television specials that traditionally usher in the new year in Quebec. Taken together, they should not have made for happy watching for anyone who cares about the democratic health of the province.

Et Dieu créa Laflaque is a popular weekly Radio-Canada show based on a cartoon character created by La Presse’s brilliant cartoonist Serge Chapleau. If one had to sum up its New Year’s Eve special in one sentence, it would be a pox on all political houses.

Tailored as a James Bond parody, it cast the leading federal and Quebec politicians either as villains eager to fool voters or as bumbling idiots.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper fell in the first category with Quebec minister Maxime Bernier and Liberal Denis Coderre closer to the other end of the scale.

Together they formed a secret club called Les Rapaces (birds of prey) whose conspiracy to replace tea leaves with heavy oil Laflaque was on a mission to unravel.

That show set the tone for more theatre of the absurd on Radio-Canada’s 2012 Bye Bye. It turned out to be richer in gallows humour — sometimes in the literal sense of the word — than true laughs.

A sample: The hit of the current television drama season in Quebec revolves around life inside a minimum security prison for women.

That inspired a sketch that featured four former leading female Liberal ministers in the role of detainees — jailed for their actions on the behalf of former premier Jean Charest.

Gérald Tremblay, who recently resigned as mayor of Montreal, was portrayed as a blind fool, as oblivious to the men hidden in plain sight in the bedroom he shares with his wife as to the bandits stuffing money in a strongbox in his office.

His Laval colleague, Gilles Vaillancourt, was shown trying to flush cash down a toilet, presumably in the lead-up to a police raid. That vignette was borrowed from a reported incident involving the ex-mayor’s cousin.

Former premier Lucien Bouchard was depicted as a contemptuous crank and Marois as a clueless driver.

To the probable relief of the current sovereigntist government, its federalist predecessors took most of the year-end hits.

But Marois and her ministers would be seriously deluded to believe that a poisoned political well does not risk rendering their own minority tenure toxic.

Almost four million viewers watched the 2012 Bye Bye. While one can quarrel with the subtlety of the sketches, the show was generally well received.

To all intents and purposes, its spirit was in sync with a public mood that has grown unforgiving of politicians — regardless of their partisan stripe.

At the time of the 1960s Quiet Revolution, Quebecers transferred much of the trust they once vested in the Church to the state and its political high priests. But with so many of the latter in disgrace these days, the province’s governing institutions are coming to be seen as desecrated temples.

It is not hard to draw a link between the lifeless sovereignty debate or, on the federalist side, the benign indifference that attends the actions of the Quebec-strong NDP on Parliament Hill with the crisis of political confidence that has overtaken the province.

This atmosphere is a blessing for a government such as Harper’s, which avoids putting itself in the face of a disengaged Quebec, and a curse for a government such as Marois’ whose sovereignty project calls for an increasingly improbable collective leap of faith.

Chantal Hebert is a news services columnist who writes on national affairs.